“I think, therefore I am”. Descarte may well have made up this pithy and philosophical sounding phrase to pick up young ladies but we may never know. What we do know is that this is perhaps the most oft’ quoted phrase by anyone filling up a liberal arts degree with philosophy 101.
In truth, this phrase is perhaps as selfish as it is erroneous. Like so much in modern philosophy, good thought is somewhat lost in nice sounding slogans. We can no more trust our thought than we trust our senses and yet we routinely trust these, even with our very lives.
I had a psychology professor who also owned a commercial pilot’s licence who told the intriguing story of a time where he was flying a Cessna solo through a stormcloud. Lightning seemed to strike the plane, or at the very least, struck close to it and he was sure that it had affected his instruments, since the horizon indicator was spinning and the altimeter needle was dropping rapidly. In fact, it was only when a pen in his shirt pocket fell up past his face and he caught a glimpse of the bottom of the cloud in front of him that he realised that his instruments were correct. His plane was in a spiralling nose-dive.
Yes, of course he survived. He told us the story remember?
Well, we routinely trust our senses, even though they lie to us almost as often. We have a fairly ordinary field of view in colour and yet our brains do a fine job of filling in the rest of our visual field with colour. If you don’t believe me, get a friend to grab two different coloured whiteboard markers (with coloured caps) and put one in each hand whilst your arms are outstretched at 180 degrees to your body. Fix on a point in front. Bring your arms slowly into your field of view until you can just see them in your peripheral vision. Guess the colours. Then look at the real colours. You will most likely be wrong. Repeat it with your pens in the same hands and sure as day they will be easy to see in their correct colours.
Now, I come across a number of “thinking” types from time to time that question faith or some aspect of Christian belief on the basis that “it can’t be reasoned” confidently. I always find this rather remarkable, knowing how fallible the human mind is. In fact Dr Edward De Bono has even gone so far as to suggest that we construct new information in a way which suits us on the way into our brains, we don’t even wait for it to get there before we twist it. If this is the case our brains are certainly not working towards us being objective in any sense.
So how are we to both arrive at and fertilise our faith or beliefs? Perhaps with a wonderful combination of an insightful brain and a supernatural touch that taps us on the shoulder and lets us know that we are both known and loved by our creator.
